The post highlights that despite declining government spending per capita, real spending remains above pre-pandemic levels due to rising health and superannuation costs.
How the framings classify across 3 articles. Each framing is labelled by a small AI stance classifier; see the methodology page for details.
Stacked weekly counts; colour by lean. “n/a” covers government and iwi-Māori sources where lean isn't applicable.
How this topic has been named, week by week. A new alias winning out is usually a framing shift.
Verbatim segments from politicians speaking on podcasts and radio shows about this topic. Sourced via the voice-reference library — each speaker has been confirmed manually from their voice clip. Click play to stream the original audio from the publisher, pre-seeked to the moment the quote starts.
Now, as you would expect, expect, I'm a huge fan of Nicola Willis's plan to cut down the size of the public sector. This is the second thing that I've been harping on at her about. The other one was obviously the fees-free year for the university students. So I'm stoked that on this show we've got two from two in terms of agitating for cutting back on wasteful public spending. The public service in this country is too big. There are 63,000 public servants. There were only 47,000 odd public servants when Jacinda and Grant started throwing money around. We have 39 government departments and ministries. Ireland has 18. Australia has 16. We have 39. We have government departments like the Ministry for Women that don't appear to do anything other than write reports and make work for themselves. Now anyone arguing for us not to cut back public servants, and there are some people who are doing this today, need to explain why. And if the answer is, oh, because it's someone's job, well, that is not an answer. Because if it is a job that we don't need, but we just keep that job just to keep someone in work, then that is just really expensive welfare, isn't it?
Up to 12 framings spread across orientations. Each framing is a short phrase the topic extractor generated to characterise the piece's stance — not a quote from the source. Click through to read the original.
political messaging around fiscal responsibility
Finance Minister puts money where her mouth is by reducing Budget's operating allowanceexcessive expenditure on non-essential roles
Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Let's make a start on unwinding years of public sector bloatSocial-media signal on the same topic, drawn from the social lens. Engagement is likes + 2×shares + 3×replies, the same weighting used across the digest cards. View on /social →
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